Rentboy

invisible. Only now he
    comprehended the ridiculousness of that assumption. Any number of people had seen him. Perhaps
    even someone he knew.
    Burning with shame, he hurried out to the street and away from Soho in the gathering dusk.
    Chapter Eleven
    The office was in darkness, and even though Fox had seen his father leave the house half an hour
    since, he did not dare put the light on. Instead he opened the venetian blinds enough to allow light
    from the driveway spotlights to enter. With a small flashlight he went through the desk drawer for
    William Baillie’s life insurance policy. He found two guns and several boxes of ammunition. The
    man was a frigging nut, so convinced of his own power he didn’t even bother to lock up his guns,
    believing not one of his family members would dare use the weapons on him despite his brutality.
    “There’s a nasty shock in store for you when I get my act together…sir.”
    The life insurance policy was not there.
    Across the room there was a filing cabinet. It wasn’t locked either. Baillie had ordered his
    family never to enter his office without permission, and they always obeyed him—until now. In the
    file marked insurance he found the policy and slipped it out, making certain to take note of its exact
    placement in the file. His father would know at once if it had been moved.
    Cross-legged on the floor, Fox pored over the wad of papers, searching for a number. There it
    was. “Thank you!” he whispered. On William Baillie’s death by illness, accident, murder by a party
    outside of the immediate family, natural causes, or acts of God, the beneficiary, Afton Baillie, would
    be entitled to one million pounds. His father had not bothered to put the policy in his mum’s name,
    assuming she would be in no shape to take up her responsibilities in the event of his death. Fox was
    an adult now, and he was in a position to take care of them all when Baillie was dead.
    Fox replaced the file, returned to his father’s desk, and took out the guns. A GLOCK 26 and a
    GLOCK 27 lay in his hands. Both guns were used by the secret service, or so Baillie had told him.
    Fox loaded the ten-round magazine into the 26 and the nine round into the 27, having been taught from
    an early age by his father. He was a decent shot when his hands were steady. Baillie had taken him to
    the firing range from the age of ten and stood over him while he practiced. “This is for when you’re
    in Special Forces,” he would say.
    This is for killing you, sir.
    “Long shot, pardon the pun,” Fox whispered. “But if I’m lucky, he’ll pick it up to fondle it”—his
    father had done that many a time while giving him hell. It was a great intimidation tactic—“and the
    gun will go off, killing him. Hopefully.” But what if it ended up killing someone else? What if the
    bastard was threatening the twins or his mum, and it went off?
    “Shit!” Car headlights lit up the driveway. His fingers less nimble now from fear, Fox unloaded
    the guns and put everything away again, positioning them exactly as he had found them. There had to
    be another way.
    Listening intently, he heard the front door open. Voices came from the hall outside the office. He
    flipped off the flashlight and crawled on hands and knees across the floor to a couple of big,
    comfortable leather chairs sitting under the window. Fox got behind the first one just as the door
    opened and the overhead light flooded the room.
    “So what’s going on that we couldn’t talk about in the pub?” Baillie asked, but his tone did not
    carry the belligerence Fox was used to. It was the tone his father had used when speaking to the
    Ugandan man. William Baillie was afraid of him, or at least wary of him, and that was rare.
    The Ugandan man’s distinctive voice answered. “The Lintrane. Atherton changed the pesticide
    compound. It is no longer lethal to human beings, only to insects. I sent the data via an encrypted file
    as soon as I got it. My facility outside Kampala was standing by ready to go into production. The test
    batch killed the stem borers on the maize and sorghum crops, but it did not kill the large test animals,
    so it will not kill people. They sent me word at once to say the compound must have been changed.”
    “I didn’t know he had changed it.” It was the doctor who had been there last time. Howard. “He
    sent me the report, but I didn’t go over it. When the data was stolen by your son, Captain Baillie, I
    thought